Week 10 – just for fun

Hi All,
After thinking about the fact that it’s a short week, I thought that it would make more sense to find simple online toys – a pair of things that may be useful, but that are also uncomplicated and interesting. After looking around, and spending rather a lot of time trying to find things that amused me as well as seemed to have some utility, I settled on two:
The first is: http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/
I get a lot of questions about finding things [outside of work, of course] and many of them are fairly simple – Let Me Google That For You seems to be a useful tool to cover some of those things. The idea behind LMGTFY that you can build a complicated search in google [or a simple one], and simply send someone the link created on the site. It then reruns the search within their browser, like:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cardinals+playoff+%22north+central%22+site%3Ad3football.com
I’ve no idea how long this site will be around, as I can’t imagine that Google is delighted by it. You might find it interesting, though – and perhaps helpful around the holidays.

The second thing is something that I find sort of fascinating – perhaps you will, too, or perhaps you’ll decide that I’m vaguely mad – Wordle creates java-based, on the fly "word clouds". If you haven’t seen one of these, they’re quite interesting.
You can paste in some text [or the link to a blog feed] and the application will parse the words in it, finding the most common ones. Those are then displayed in varying sizes, with the most common words in the document or site being the largest. There are a lot of layout options, from font choices to colorways, adjustments for language, general layout and number of words to display. Some of the things that are returned are very nearly word art -
Please note, however, if you save it to the online gallery, they’ll be visible to anyone who uses the Wordle site. While I don’t think there are any copyright implications…

Here are some of the more interesting ones I built:
Text copied from a series of our web pages:



The Fall ’08 Ex Libris


The recently updated Library Disaster Plan [Thanks Belinda!]

and last, though surely not least: The entire 2nd book of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andros to Austria…

http://www.wordle.net/create

The biggest trick with Wordle is that you have to copy the image and paste it... though printing is also possible.

Have fun with these - if you have alternatives, by all means post them, and we'll give them a try!

jjs

Week 9, Part 2 - Fun with Language redux

I hope that everyone has been discovering new fun phrases to use [or that may make you cringe, depending]. We've got a good number of comments to the initial posting, so it's about time to post the translations or expansions of the acronyms for those who decided not to search all of them out -

Let's see if we were right about the familiar ones, and learn some new ones!
jjs

Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs

Week 8 – Time to Chat, part 1

Well, we’ve made it to week 8, having been through a lot of different tools and ideas so far, so here is another weekly post. Chat programs have been around for years now, and there are different tools and different interfaces that we can choose from. The one that we’re going to work with is, not surprisingly GTalk from Google. I chose this one for two primary reasons. First, we all have Google addresses from the Blogger/Gmail trials we have already done. Second, and probably more important, we’re probably going to be moving the Chat Reference service over to GTalk in the near future, so if we’re going to take a look at one of these tools, and spend some time getting used to it, it’s probably the best solution.

There are two primary uses for a chat program in our Library. One of them is for external communication, like the Chat Reference that we’re already doing. The main benefit of GTalk in this area is that we can create a direct chat function on the web page that doesn’t require the student to have to download software or even a Google account in order to chat with us. That’s a project that we’ve been looking into.

The other primary use is for internal communications. I’ve been in libraries where everyone was logged into a chat program for most of the day, just marking themselves away when they left their desk, or turning the program off when they needed to really concentrate on something without any interruption. While we already have a lot of possible tools for internal communication, from phones to email to walking, chat is another possible tool, and so we’ll take a shot to see how useful it might be for us. If you think of it as a sort of email lite, you may get an idea of how it might be useful.

If all else fails, it will give us a chance to practice with the idea of using a tool to chat, among ourselves, and will also allow us to prepare for using GTalk as a tool to talk to the outside world. That does bring up one of the downfalls of chat-based program use in a work setting, though, and that probably should be mentioned here. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where chat extends beyond the work place, and begins to consume more time than any of us would want. I hope that we can avoid that particular issue, but we do have to be aware of it.

More follows on Friday, about how we’ll want to proceed with this test, and the different ways that we can move forward with the Week 8 trials!
jjs